Senior ML engineer at FAANG
Five years post-PhD, two production launches, one platform-level call. The bullets that landed this resume share a pattern: every metric has a baseline, every system has a serving stack, every claim names what was owned.
Priya Iyer
Education
Experience
- Owned the L2 ranker for the global search surface; raised nDCG@10 from 0.41 to 0.49 on a 280M-query offline eval and +1.7% revenue per session at p<0.01 in a 7-week A/B across 1.4B sessions.
- Trained a 350M-parameter cross-encoder on 1.2B click pairs in PyTorch with FlashAttention-2; cut training cost from 12k to 3.8k A100-hours through gradient checkpointing and mixed-precision FSDP.
- Cut p99 ranker latency from 240ms to 92ms on 8K req/s by quantizing the model to int8 with TensorRT and adding a feature-cache hot-shard; held quality regression to <0.4% nDCG.
- Led the offline-online gap investigation across 4 quarters; identified label leakage from query-rewrite features that inflated offline gains by ~30% and shipped a holdout protocol now used by 6 ranking teams.
- Mentored 3 mid-level engineers through full launch cycles and authored the team's launch-quality review doc adopted by all 12 ranking projects in 2024.
- Built and open-sourced an internal eval-harness library used by 12 ranking projects in 2024; cut new-experiment setup time from 3 days to 2 hours and standardized 4 quality regression checks across the org.
- Drove the 2024 ranking-stack consolidation: merged 3 forks of the L1 retrieval model into a single training pipeline; reduced training-engineering on-call load by 41% while preserving model-team independence.
- Built the team's counterfactual replay framework on top of the search log archive; replaced 3 weeks of bake-in testing with 4 hours of replay across 12M production queries, now used by 5 ranking teams.
- Drove the L1 retrieval switch from BM25 to a learned sparse retriever (SPLADE-v2); +0.6% nDCG@10 on the global eval and a 14% reduction in query-time index size.
- Worked on improvements to the ads click prediction model.
- Built a multi-task learning architecture sharing embeddings across click and conversion heads; +0.9% revenue at p<0.05 on 480M daily impressions, with 2.1x training throughput vs the prior two-head split-tower.
- Owned weekly retraining cadence for 3 production models across 14 months with zero rollbacks attributable to training-pipeline issues.
- Built feature-freshness monitoring for 9 conversion features across the funnel; cut feature drift incidents from 6/month to 1/month over 8 months and removed the manual freshness audit from the launch checklist.
- Drove the migration from a TensorFlow 1.x training stack to PyTorch + Ray; cut wall-clock training time on the click model from 14h to 4.2h on the same A100 footprint and unblocked 3 follow-on architectural changes.
- Built the team's first online learning pipeline that incrementally retrained the click model every 6 hours; replaced the weekly manual retrain and cut staleness-related accuracy drift by ~40% on the offline replay set.
Technical Skills
Senior ML resumes do not need to list more bullets. They need bullets that name the thing that was owned, the metric that moved, and the scope it moved across.



